RE-CONCEPTUALIZATION OF RACE AND AGENCY

IN JAMAICA KINCAID'S

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY MOTHER

Izabella Penier

The Academy of Humanities and Economics (AHE),

Łódź

Abstract: Jamaica Kincaid, arguably the most popular Caribbean woman writer living in the

USA, has produced many o f her bestsellers by dissecting her personal and familial history.

Yet in spite of her inclination to anchor the life o f her creative inventions in her personal and

intimate experience, Kincaid, known for her radicalism and militancy, can be a fiercely polit­
ical writer. The aim o f this essay is to explore how Kincaid handles the trope o f race in her
novel The Autobiography o f My Mother, how she uses racial imagery to unearth the covert

mechanisms that account for the intricacies of identity formation and how she dismantles ide­

ological foundations that paved the way for racial exploitation. 1 will in particular focus on

how Kincaid challenges, undermines and recasts the (post)colonial concept o f race by show­

ing that racial identity is a shifting category conceived through interaction with other cate­

gories o f identification such as class and gender.
Keywords: relational identity, race, gender, class, sexuality.

Perhaps due to her international status, Kincaid has managed to escape the

identitarian categories through which postcolonial, African American and femi­

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GENDER STUDIES Vol. 9 No. 1/2010

nist studies have framed their discussions of agency. But even though she
eschews the politics of feminism and race, Kincaid is incessantly preoccupied
with the issue of power, which she links with the concept of race. For her race no
longer boils down to somatic differences: "My husband is white, my children are

half white/7 says Kincaid about her marriage to Allen Shawn (the couple are now

divorced), "I can really no longer speak of race because I no longer understand

what it means. I can speak with more clarity about power." (Jones 1990:75) For
Kincaid race is not an essence in itself but a shorthand for something broader, an

imbalance of power (Mantle 1997). Kincaid claims that "[she] can't imagine that
she would invent an identity based on the color of [her] skin" because for her

"[there] are so many things that make up identity and one of them is not identi­

ty" (Cryer 1996). Kincaid argues against treating "race" as a separate category of
analysis just as she refuses to recognize her sex as a major coordinate in the
process of her identity formation. In her interview with Selwyn Cudjoe she reca­

pitulates: "It's just too slight to cling to your skin color or your sex, when you
think of the great awe that you exist at all" (Cudjoe 1989:401). Kincaid asserts that
"one's identity should proceed from an internal structure, from one's internal
truth" (Hayden 1997) and that truth cannot be reduced to racial categories that
are ultimately only relations of power. (Mantle 1997)

Kincaid's views tap into the recent debates about racial politics, racial dis­

course and agency triggered by contemporary critics who write under the aegis

of various schools of literary practice such as Postcolonialism, Afro-American
criticism, and the Black Atlantic model. The project to revise and rewrite the
racial discourse has brought together different black thinkers such as Edouard
Glissant, Henry Louis Gates and Paul Gilroy, who even though they do not share
one agenda, theorize about race and power in a similar fashion and expose con­

ventional cultural constructions through which racial otherness is represented. In

this way those theoreticians have outlined a new analytical territory that tran­
scends the critical boundaries with which postcolonial, Afro American and

transatlantic studies have been traditionally separated.

I want to offer a model of reading Kincaid's novel which takes its clue from

theoretical interpellations of these post-essentialist critics — Glissant, Gilroy and

Gates — and which, in the words of Gates (1986:6), aims at "deconstructing] the
ideas of difference inscribed in the trope of race [and] explicating] the discourse
itself in order to reveal the hidden relations of power." Therefore I will begin with
an overview of their discourses on race to provide grounding for my examination
of racial, sexual and class configurations in Kincaid's fiction.

Edouard Glissant, one of the first Caribbean critics to take issue with the

phenomena of globalization and hybridity, can be credited with creating the
model of relational identity — an identity that comes into being as a result of the

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WOMEN WRITERS SUBVERT THE CANON

continuous process of racial, cultural, religious and linguistic mixing — called
Créolisation. Créolisation leads to endless proliferation of identities which do not
fall into preconceived and fixed categories that classify groups of people into pre­
dictable and rigid categories. Glissant and some other Caribbean thinkers
(Brathwaite, for example) incited the turn of the century polemics on multicultur-
alism and cultural syncretism that marked out a new field of analysis of the

nature of cultural identity that at our present historical juncture seems to be

unstable, mutable and never completely finished. His writings helped to bring to
the fore the themes of nationality, migrancy, and cultural affiliation that have
done a lot to discredit West Indian cultural nationalism that proposed to under­

stand race, ethnicity and nationhood as invariable and hermetic categories.

Glissant was also one of the first critics who warned the black writing elites

against failing into the pitfalls of anti-colonial nationalism which used the con­
cept of identity, grounded in roots, folklore and racial authenticity as the major

weapon against imperialism. Black essentialism was conceived as a unifying dis­
course whose primary function was to resist colonialism and defy and reverse
racist stereotypes and hierarchies. And although as Glissant is quick to point out,

it did a lot to "revalorize" denigrated indigenous cultures, still he condemns race-
based politics as counter-productive. Glissant proposes to replace Négritude's
model of racial identity with his model of rhizome identity, which he defined as

"multiple spreading of filaments of simultaneous being" (James 1999:112) and

which, in his opinion, better accounts for the cultural and geopolitical intricacies
of the Caribbean region.

Gilroy, who created an emergent school of cultural criticism which he called

the Black Atlantic, goes one step further to evolve the concept of the fluidity of
identities. Gilroy offers a powerful redress to the claims of nationalism by chal­

lenging black nationalist thinkers to investigate how they frame their own discus­
sions about race and culture and how their thinking is configured by their imbed-
dedness in the Enlightenment philosophy and Romantic ideas about what consti­
tutes "race," "nation" and "people." According to Gilroy despite their ostenta­
tious attempts at disaffiliation, those thinkers theorize about race and agency

with concepts and terms borrowed from the Euro-American age of revolutions
and Romantic nationalism. These critics often emphasize ancestry and roots as
the foundation of identity, rather than think of it as an ongoing quest: "modem

black political discourse has always been more interested in the relationship of
identity to roots and rootedness than seeing identity as a process of movement

that is more appropriately approached via the homonym routes" (Gilroy
1993:19). Gilroy associates black intellectuals' desire for "acquisition of roots"

with the post-emancipation period when rootedness began to be seen as a prereq­
uisite of national identity and with the post-independence period when postcolo­

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GENDER STUDIES Vol. 9 No. 1/2010

nial peoples were engaged in the project of building nation-sates. In general,
looking for roots ~ for stable and presumably authentic forms of subjectivity and
identification — and for normative configurations of racial/national difference
was what motivated the vast majority of black intellectuals in the 20th century.

Gilroy repeatedly stresses the futility of the pursuit of black essentialism

and sensitizes blacks to the significance of plurality that exists underneath
African unity. Black particularity, in Gilroy's opinion is complex and internally
divided, not only by class and gender but also by age and relocation. In his 1993

study The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Gilroy focuses
chiefly on relocation, on the "restless recombinant qualities of the Black Atlantic
affirmative cultures" (1993:31). In his later book Against Race Gilroy offers anoth­

er profound corrective revision of the black discourse on race and launches one
more attack against "the lazy essentialism that modem sages inform us we can­

not escape" (2000:53). Again he rebuts the idea that blackness in a monolithic and

unitary construct, and he refuses to recognize it as a common cultural condition
based on shared interests and political solidarity of the whole race. He reminds

his readers that race is an illusive category of identity whose origins can be traced
back to the scientific racism of the previous centuries (eugenics, craniometry and
phrenology) and whose major objective was to prove the inferiority of the black
man and provide a rationale for his further exploitation. Whereas the 20th centu­
ry science abolished the claims of biological determinism, race as a social con­
struct continues to exert influence on political culture and bears upon the dynam­
ics of identity formation with the effect that raced-based politics of identity is
"pious ritual in which we always agree that 'race' is invented but are required to

defer to its embeddedness in the world and to accept that the demand for justice
requires us nevertheless to enter political arenas it helps to mark out" (2000:52)

H. L. Gates, whom Gilroy calls a "cultural interventionist," was one of the

first African American theoreticians who grappled with the issues of globalism
and cultural hybridity and in consequence gave black criticism a new dynamic
direction. For Gates race is "a dangerous trope" (1986:5). In a vein similar to
Gilroy, Gates argues that race is a metaphor: "[rjace as a meaningful criterion

within the biological sciences has long been recognized to be a fiction. When we
speak of the 'white race' or 'the black race' 'the Jewish race' or 'the Aryan race/
we speak in biological misnomers and, more generally, metaphors" (1986:4). Race

is a social construct and, though it has been freed from the constraints of biolog­
ical determinism, it is still enmeshed in the false assumptions of social determin­
ism which continues to define our "color-coded" civilization, to use Gilroy's
phrase (1993:125). The inscription of the racially bound identity is automatic
because race is seen as a pre-existing, fixed and finite category. Bodies equipped
with racial markers are still perceived as lod of alterity. They are a repository of

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WOMEN WRITERS SUBVERT THE CANON

pre-established norms of behavior, psychological traits and moral attributes typ­

ical of a given race. According to Gates "the term 'race' has both described and

inscribed differences in language, belief system, artistic tradition, and gene pool,
as well as all sorts of supposedly natural attributes such as rhythm, athletic abil­

ity, cerebration, usury, fidelity and so forth" (1986:5).

Racially marked bodies are also sites of the subaltern as racial difference is

more often than not read hierarchically "Race has become a trope of ultimate dif­
ference between cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific beliefs sys­
tems which — more often than not — also have fundamentally opposed econom­
ic interests", claims Gates (1986:5). Those clashing economic interests are the real
reason why people so tenaciously cling to the idea of difference grounded in race.
Therefore, in Gates's view, "current language use [of the term "race'] signifies the
difference between cultures and their possessions of power, spelling out the dis­
tance between subordinate and superordinate, between bondsman and lord in
terms of their 'race'" (1986:6).

In literature, too, the dynamics of racial subordination often converge with

the dynamics of racial representation. Gates holds that literacy is "the emblem"

that connects "racial alienation" with "economic and political alienation"

(1986:9). Literary discourse, as well as critical discourse are, to his mind, a battle­
ground for the racial dimensions of power. Like Gilroy, who pointed out that race
as a cultural and literary category was created by those in power to solidify the

social hierarchy and to uphold the relations of power, Gates asserts that the great
white Western tradition is not "universal, color-blind, apolitical, or neu­
tral," (1986:15) as we, readers, were led to believe. Conversely, both literature and
critical practice contain an ideological subtext that strives to prevent any demo­
cratic change in power relations and to preserve the status quo. Ever since the
Enlightenment, contends Gates, writing has been valorized as the supreme

expression of human reason because, as Hume claimed, it was the ultimate sign
of difference between animal and human. Consequently, the human status was
ascribed only to those who could master "'the arts and sciences' the 18th century
formula for writing" (1986: 8). Therefore "if blacks could write and publish imag­
inative literature," argues Gates, "then they could, in effect, take 'a few giant

steps' up the chain of being [...]" (1986:8). According to Gates, black people did
accept the challenge by trying to "recreate the image of race in European dis­
course" (1986:11), but time did not bear out the effectiveness of this strategy

because black people were not liberated from racism with their writings — they

"did not obliterate the difference of race, rather the inscription of the black voice

in the Western literatures has preserved those very cultural differences"

(1986:12). Thus Gates, like Glissant and Gilroy, takes a stand against back essen-

tialism which in his opinion fell into the trap of uncritically accepting the precepts

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GENDER STUDIES Vol. 9 No. 1/2010

of Western political thought. "When we tend to appropriate, by inversion, 'race'
as a term for essence — as did negritude movement," concludes Gates, "we yield
too much: the basis of shared humanity" (1986:13). To get out of this unproduc­

tive situation, Gates advises all non-canonical and/or Third World critics to "ana­
lyze the ways in which writing relates to race, how attitudes toward racial differ­
ences generate and structure literary texts by [black people] and about [black

people]" (1986:15).

My reading of Kincaid's text was inspired by Gates's and Gilroy's observa­

tions about the correlation between race, literacy and power. It also adheres to

Glissant's model of relational identity which has superseded the model of rooted
identity, a concept I extend to include not only the collusion of races, cultures and
languages but also criss-crossing of several other rubrics of identification such as
class, gender and sexuality within a single nation or "race." In other words, I

explore intra-racial divisions within black singularity when these mutually affec­
tive categories interact to either empower or dis-empower a black subject

The Autobiography of My Mother

, Kincaid's 19% novel, focuses on the charac­

ter of Xuela Claudette Richardson — a Dominican woman of mixed ethnic origin
(Scottish-African on her father's side and Carib on her mother's side). Xuela
muses on her life from the vantage point of her old ripe age and examines her
relations with the colonial culture fleshed out in the person of her opportunist
father — Alfred Richardson — an ex-policeman and magistrate who amassed a
sizeable fortune by humiliating and robbing others. He is the embodiment of the
colonial presence — a ruthless capitalist whose "skin was the color of corruption:
copper, gold, ore" (Kincaid 1996:182), Since Xuela lost her mother when she was

bom, and was abandoned by her father (who disposed of her by committing her
to the care of a woman who washed his dirty laundry), the orphaned and disin­

herited Xuela is left exposed and vulnerable to the habitual brutality of colonial
life which leads to her self-destructiveness and moral deformity — she refuses to
love anyone but herself and aborts every child she conceives. She eventually mar­
ries a white doctor Philip, having poisoned his first wife Moira, but doggedly
refuses to reciprocate his love and treats their relationship as an occasion to set­
tle the score with the white colonizer's race.

The Autobiography of My Mother

presents a whole range of perspectives on

the problem of identity formation by dramatizing the cultural construction of
Xuela's and her father's subjectivity. Both of them are Creoles with hyphenated
identities — Scottish-African in his case, Scottish-African-Carib in hers. Both of
them are aware of the fact that identity is not a given, that it is a matter of choice
and a political stance — not physical phenotypes but behavior, loyalties and val­
ues are what makes a person either black or white.

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Alfred, named by his Scottish father after Alfred the Great, gives preference

to his paternal lineage and disowns his maternal African heritage. He fails to
appreciate his mother Mary, who "remained to him without clear features though
she must have mended his clothes, cooked his food, tended his schoolboy's

wounds, encouraged his ambitions [...]" (Kincaid 1996:183). Her surname is
unknown — she is one of the African people, and "the distinction between man

and people remain[ed] important to Alfred, who [was] aware that the African
people came off the boat as a part of the horde, already demonized, mind blank
to everything but suffering," while the white man "came off the boat of his own

volition, seeking to fulfil a destiny, a vision of himself in his mind's eye" (Kincaid

1996:181). In "the struggle between the hyphenated man and the horde," that
takes place in Xuela's father, the hyphenated man "triumphs" (Kincaid 1996:188)

with the effect that the father comes to "despise all who behaved like the African
people; not all who looked liked them but all who behaved like them, all who
were defeated, doomed, conquered, poor, diseased, head bowed down, mind
numbed from cruelty" (Kincaid 1996:187). The father thus represents a shift from
biological to social determinism — for him race is a matter of social status,
demeanor and worldview. Blackness is not anchored in bodily characteristics but
is determined by subaltern sodal position, non-rational worldview and pagan

beliefs. As he relentlessly toils to raise his social standing through the multiplica­
tion of earthly possessions, he suppresses Obeah beliefs and practices and takes
great pride in becoming a very religious person because, to his mind, social

advance obliges to moral elevation. According to his daughter's contrary opinion,
"the more he robbed, the more money he had, the more he went to church, it is

not unheard of liking. And the richer he became the more fixed the mask on his

face grew" (Kincaid 1996:40-1).

The metaphor of the mask was presumably borrowed by Kincaid from

Frantz Fanon's seminal study Black Skin, White Masks, which, according to some

critics, must have given Kincaid an incentive to write the novel. It describes the
phenomenon that Fanon called 'Negrophobia' — the collective Caribbean uncon­

scious that equals black with ugliness, sin and immorality. In Fanon's view, black

people in West Indies "internalized" or "epidermalized" the racist views of them­

selves, believing that "one is Negro to the degree one is wicked, sloppy, mali­
cious, instinctual" (1967:192). Therefore, Fanon contends provocatively, all the

black man dreams about is to rid himself of his black identity of an inferior.

The way into the white world runs along the class axis: "One is white, as one

is rich, as one is beautiful, as one is intelligent" (1967:51-52). Therefore the acqui­
sition of wealth grants a black man entry into the genteel world. Alfred's rise to
middle class status results in his "lactification," to use Frantz Fanon's term again,
and even though he becomes an alienated mimic man, totally unable to see

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GENDER STUDIES Vol. 9 No. 1/2010

through his sham identity, he succeeds in deploying the bourgeois culture "as a

means of stripping himself of his race" (1967:225). Though his appearance — his
red hair, grey eyes, pale skin and elegant white clothes — underscores his elevat­

ed social status, the novel makes it abundantly clear that it is his upward class
mobility that defines his racial affiliation. Alfred's social trajectory from "black"
village policeman to "white" landowner and magistrate illustrates that race is a
variable category contingent on other identificatory categories such as class.

While the father allies himself with the myths of white civilization, educa­

tion and refinement, Xuela does not subscribe to this enlightened philosophical
frame. She gives preference to the forces that oppose the expansion and triumph
of these myths. She chooses "savagery" and asserts: "whatever I was told to hate

I loved and loved the most. I loved the smell of the thin dirt behind my ears, the
smell of my unwashed mouth, the smell that came from between my legs, the

smell in the pit of my arm, the smell of my unwashed feet. Whatever was native

to me, whatever I could not help and was not a moral failing I loved with the fer­

vor of the devoted" (Kincaid 1996:32-33). Xuela believes that what white culture

deems "bad" must, by definition, be "good." In this spirit she passes judgements

on what constitutes physical beauty: "My nose, half flat, half not, as if painstak­

ingly made that way, I found so beautiful that I saw in it a standard which the
noses of the people I did not like failed to meet" (Kincaid 1996:100). The world in
which Xuela lives, ruled by the Manichean oppositions, requires that a black per­
son, like Xuela or her father, should make political and ideological choices — they
must either uproot or brandish their nativism; adapt either conformist or reac­

tionary stand.

When Xuela chooses "the native" it is obvious that she feels affinity with the

exterminated Caribs rather than with the ex-African people, who survived but
lost their bearing in the modem world. They are pictured as zombies, half dead,

half alive, "walking in a trance, no longer in their own minds" (Kincaid 1996:133).
Having lost their native cosmology they have been severed from their own inner
imaginative life — they no longer trust what they intuitively know. Unlike them,
Xuela fends herself against losing access to "the inner life of her own inventions"
and ardently believes in the redoubtable influence of Obeah on everyday life.

While her father considers Obeah to be "the belief of the illegitimate, the poor, the
low" (Kincaid 1996:18) for Xuela it is an alternative epistemological frame,
through which she makes sense of the world. When on the way to school, she sees
one of her classmates lured to death in the river by a jabalesse (she-devil in

Caribbean folklore) she never relinquishes her faith in the realness of the event

she witnessed in spite of the fact that to admit having seen such an apparition

"was to say that [the black children] lived in a darkness from which [they could

not be redeemed" (Kincaid 1996:9). Xuela chooses that darkness and learns to

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WOMEN WRITERS SUBVERT THE CANON

"[separate] the real from unreal" (Kincaid 1996:42). At night she can hear the

screeches of bats or "someone who had taken fee shape of the bat/' the sound of
wings of a bird or "someone who had taken the shape of a bird" (42); "the long
sigh of someone on the way to eternity" (Kincaid 1996:43). In light of the loss of
collective memory and careful erasing of the past, which Glissant described in

The Caribbean Discourse,

Obeah provides Xuela with a means for the imaginative

repossession of the past. As she lies in her bed at night concentrating on the
sounds coming form outside she finds herself in the "dark room of history"
(Kincaid 1996: 61-2):

I could hear the sound of those who crawled on their bellies, the ones who car­

ried the poisonous lances; and those who carried the poison in their saliva; I could
hear the ones who were hunting, the ones who were hunted, the pitiful cry of the
small ones who were about to be devoured, followed by the temporary satisfaction
of the ones doing the devouring [...] (Kincaid 1996:43)

Xuela's steady belief in the power of Obeah — an epistemic perspective that

undermines the colonizer's ontology — is a sign of her resistance, her stubborn
refusal to be confined within the Western grids of knowledge.

Xuela's father "whitens" himself climbing the social ladder; by contrast

Xuela inverts her father's trajectory and ''blackens" herself transgressing gender
roles. Even though she marries way above her own class and race she does not to
do it with a view to becoming a mother and a lady. She not only refuses to be a

bearer of children but also uses her sexuality to subvert traditional colonial script­

ing of femininity. Her uninhibited eroticism taps into the stereotype of sexual
wantonness of the black female body that was bequeathed by slavery, perpetuat­
ed by colonial plantocracies and enhanced by the repressive Victorian sexual

mores. It contrasted the alleged black female promiscuity with the idealization of
the white female body. Xuela is aware how this dynamics of differentiation oper­
ates and what purposes it serves: "a lady," according to her definition, "is combi­

nation of elaborate fabrications, a collection of externals, facial arrangements, and
body parts, distortions, lies and empty effort" (Kincaid 1996:159). That definition

is at variance with the way Xuela perceives herself: "I was a woman and as that I

had a brief definition: two breasts, a small opening between my legs, one womb,
it never varies and they are always in the same place" (Kincaid 1996:159).

Xuela uses her sexuality to draw a line between herself and Moira, a white

English lady who is the best proof that emancipation did not erase the analogous
divisions between men and people, ladies and women, on which the concept of
Englishness depended: "she was a lady, I was a woman and this distinction was
for her important, it allowed her to believe that I could not associate the ordinary

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GENDER STUDIES Vol. 9 No. 1/2010

— a bowel movement, a cry of ecstasy — with her, and a small act of cruelty was

elevated to a rite of civilization" (Kincaid 1996:158-9). Moira is presented as an
asexual woman who does not share a bedroom with her husband and who looks
like a man ~ her hair is "cropped close to her head like a man's," (Kincaid

1996:156) and her femininity boils down to two little breasts likened to "two old

stones" and "a broken womb" (Kincaid 1996:147). She is proud of the color of her
skin — the most visible marker of racial differentiation, but Kincaid's narrative
points to the futility of clinging to skin color as a major determinant of identity.
Moira undergoes posthumous epidermal permutation — her skin turns black as

a result of poisoning, and eventually, as it turns out, with both Xuela and Moira
being black and childless, what differentiates these two female protagonists is
their contradictory attitude to sexuality. It is the exhibition of her uninhibited sex­

ual agency that makes Xuela "black," just as Moira's impaired sexuality makes
her "white."

Though Xuela's characterization fits into the radst stereotype of the over-

sexualized black woman, Kincaid deftly changes the dynamics of colonial sexual
representation because in the case of Xuela the sexual encounter with the white
man does not trigger her sexual exploitation. On the contrary, in her relationship
with Philip, Xuela uses her sexuality to subjugate and exploit him. Although at
first she assumes the role of a slave, binding his belt around her wrists, still she
controls their sexual act, giving Philip directions which he obediently follows. In
this way the representation of the colonial encounter with the sexual other is sub­
verted — Philip in not the dominant subject who projects his sexual fantasies on
the racial other but a sexual slave enacting Xuela's wild fantasies. According to
Gary E. Holcomb and Kimberly S. Holcomb, Xuela simulates the reversal of colo­

nial power and dominates Philip to shift agency from the master's to the slave's
body and blur the distinction between the two.

Through the renunciation of maternity and her narcissistic and predatory

sexuality, Xuela defies the colonial power that wants to reduce her to subaltern
position. Kincaid allows Xuela to hold on to the Manichean economy of colonial­
ist discourse and the radst and sexist stereotype of black female sexuality to show
that historical contexts are also constitutive of identity. In this way Kincaid not

only exposes the mechanism of colonial ideological system, its logic of interracial
encounters and its categories of representation, but first and foremost, she reveals
that there is a concealed power dimension that determines the workings of radal
instability. Race enhances meaning through adherence to or violation of gender
and sexual roles that can respectively subject or liberate an individual from colo­

nial and patriarchal domination. Consequently it becomes impossible for the

reader to treat race, gender and sexuality as "discrete categories of analysis"
(2005:109). As Judith Butler daims:

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WOMEN WRITERS SUBVERT THE CANON

[though] there are good historical reasons for keeping 'race' and 'sexuality'

and 'sexual difference7 as separate analytic spheres, there are also quite pressing his­
torical reasons for asking how and where we might not only read their convergence,

but the sites at which the one can not be constituted without the other. (1993; 169)

Similarly Xuela's father understanding of race as entwined with social posi­

tion undermines the colonial and early postcolonial concept of racial identity
determined by lineage, dissent or blood. His conceptualization of race as
white/black binary also reinforces the Manichean system of white bias, but at the
same time it puts emphasis on the fluctuating meaning of race which is irrevoca­

bly connected with power. Race and class become tropic configurations or inter­
related axes of power and the protagonists are "whitened/empowered" or, by

inference, "blackened/disempowered" as they travel up or down the social scale.

"The complicated divisions of class-race-color stratification," which in

Hall's opinion replaced "the legal castes of slavery/' (1985:281) are compounded

by the protagonists' lingual affiliations. Language is a key factor forming the
Caribbean social reality. Although Kincaid's novel is written in elegant Anglo-
American English, her careful designation of the code of her protagonists' parole
is very informative of Caribbean social choices. In the Caribbean, standard
English or French are used in official situations — they connote respect and
respectability. English Creole or French patois or pidgin are scorned as the lan­
guages of the illiterate and dispossessed. When a middle class person uses Creole

vernacular it is usually to speak to a social inferior, for example a servant. In lit­
erature, however, this code-switching, from English/French — the language of
the colonizer to Creole/patois, the language of the colonized dark masses is more
discordant as it reflects social insecurity and anxiety produced by color-coded
social stratification.

This linguistic continuum frames the sodal panorama of Kincaid's novel.

The father who wants to rise sodally and, in the words of Fanon, "be elevated
above his jungle status" (1967:18), uses standard English to make himself social­
ly acceptable. He speaks English with strangers as a way of manifesting his cul­
tural affiliation and exercising his supreme colonialist authority. Whenever he
addresses his countrymen in English, he not only renounces his blackness but
also reasserts his right to dominate and abuse them because "a man who has a

language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that lan­
guage" (Fanon 1967:18).

Xuela's stepmother abides by the same logic. When Xuela arrives at her

house, the stepmother speaks to her in patois to emphasize the dass distinction

between them, to discredit her and "make her illegitimate" by assodating her
with "the made-up language of people regarded as not real, the shadow people,

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GENDER STUDIES Vol. 9 No. 1/2010

the forever humiliated, the forever low" (Kincaid 1996: 30-1). Using pidgin is, to
misquote Fanon, "a manner of classifying [her], de-civilizing [her]: (Fanon
1967:32). It is meant to be a calculated insult whose aim is to draw attention to the
fact that they — Xuela and her stepmother — do not belong to the same social
caste and will never be equals.

Therefore, as Kincaid's narrative makes clear code-switching is a continuous

practice, an ongoing interaction that tips the balance in interracial and interper­
sonal relations and reveals the two-dimensionality of hybridized population. The
father shifts his idiom and speaks Creole when he is with his family. For Xuela

these moments offer brief glimpses of the remnants of his genuine selfhood: "I

associated him speaking patois with expressions of his real self" (Kincaid
1996:190), she claims. Xuela speaks patois to her white husband, while he

addresses her in Standard English: "He spoke to me, I spoke to him, he spoke to
me in English, I spoke to him in patois. We understood each other much better
that way, speaking to each other in the language of our thoughts" (Kincaid
1996:219). At the same time, Xuela gives preference to English as the language of
her social discourse. The first words she speaks are in English, "the language of
a people [she] would never like or love" (Kincaid 1996:7), but feels nevertheless
compelled to deploy it to meet her father on equal terms. Like him, she considers
patois a language of cultural and social inferiority as well as cultural impurity

brought about by creolisation. Reverting to speaking English — the language of
the privileged — is a means of severing her from the network of relationships that
bound her with the zombie-like native population.

Kincaid, who grew up in Antigua, must have heard very frequently

Antiguan Creole as well as her Dominican mother's French patois but she has
never mastered these dialects and consequently she does not use them often in
her novels. The fact has led another Caribbean writer Merle Hodge to contend
that:

[the] novels of Jamaica Kincaid actually sit on a cusp between fiction and essay

[...] Dialogue in Creole would have set up such a contrast of codes as to create a
focus which is not a part of authors theme. Code-shifting invites attention to issues

such as class and cultural difference, issues which are not central to [Kincaid's] nov­
els. (quoted in Réjouis 2003:214)

While Merle Hodge praises Kincaid's choice of excluding vernacular

inscriptions from her prose as an appropriate creative strategy to avoid dealing
with the problem of cultural syncretism and class conflict, in my opinion the

absence of such inscriptions does not rule out Kincaid's interest in those issues. It

is my contention that Kincaid's "descriptive" code-shifting — her insistence of

50

informing the reader which languages/dialects the protagonists apply in differ­
ent social contexts and personal circumstances ~ makes 'class and cultural dif­
ference' the central theme of this novel.

Kincaid establishes an interesting dialogue with her predecessors and

cotemporaries by supplying a female perspective on the theories of creolisation
and by complementing their discourses with her own observations about the
tropic representations of race, gender and class that overlap and collude in the

process of identity formation. Like Glissant, Gates and Gilroy she is dismissive of
the claims of black nationalism which instead of exploding imperialism, helped
to entrench and solidify the unjust social structure that was the legacy of colonial­
ism. Xuela repeatedly emphasizes her disavowal of essentialism: "I refused to

belong to a race. I refuse to accept a nation" (Kincaid 1996:225-6), and she pours
scorn on the "natives" who "bogged down in issues of justice and injustice, and
they had become attached to claims of ancestral heritage, and the indignities by
which they had come to these islands, as it they mattered as if they really mat­
tered" (Kincaid 1996:117). By overlooking and ignoring experiential rifts caused

by class division and gender, nationalism and its discourse perpetuated patriar­
chal and social stratification forced on the colonized people by the imperial rule,
which Kincaid's narrative strives to subvert. The post-essentialist discourse was,
likewise, a predominately male affair, very frequently aware of its own deficien­
cies and shortcomings. In Against Race, Gilroy admits that the interrelatedness
discourses on race, gender and sexuality is "something that is further than ever

from being settled and that defines a new and urgent need for future work"
(2000:45). The Autobiography of My Mother is an important book that addresses
these issues and contributes to the delineation of sociopolitical and discursive

texture of the Caribbean, enlarging the study of racial and social relations with a

new female perspective that highlights the representational interdependence of

race, class, gender and sexuality.

Even though Kincaid's characters afe still bound by the Martichean allegory

(Abdul R. Jan Mohamed's term), their race is no longer literal — it is metaphori­

cal and relational. Racial markers do not create in her novel a picture of the his­
torically objectified Caribbean subject that is defined by certain presuppositions
about the commonalities of his or her character, making it impossible for the

reader to approach protagonists with a set of pre-established racial meanings and
stereotypes. In the words of Carine M. Mardorossian, the writing of contempo­
rary Caribbean women, such as Kincaid, forces readers to adopt new reading
strategies which emphasize not whether but when characters are "black" or
"white," and it bears witness to the fact that, to quote from Maryse Conde,
"[there] are no races only cultures" (1987:30).

WOMEN WRITERS SUBVERT THE CANON

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GENDER STUDIES Vol. 9 No. 1/2010

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